One of the constellations of the southern
sky introduced by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille on his map of 1756
to symbolize experimental physics. He originally called it la
Machine Pneumatique but Latinized this to Antlia Pneumatica on
the second edition of the map published in 1763. Lacaille
depicted it as the single-cylinder type of pump used by the
French physicist Denis Papin during the early 1670s for his
experiments on vacuums, published as Expériences du Vuide
in 1674. In 1675 Papin moved from Paris to London where he
worked with the Irish physicist Robert Boyle. Here Papin
developed the double-cylinder type of pump, and it is one of
these later types of pump that was depicted by Bode his Uranographia (below).
An air pump of this type is depicted in action in the painting
titled “An Experiment on a Bird
in the Air Pump” by Joseph
Wright of Derby (1768).
There are no legends associated with this
constellation and it contains no bright stars or other objects
of note. Its name, however, is one to catch the unwary as it is
frequently mis-spelt “Antila”.
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The air pump shown as a complex piece of apparatus in the Uranographia of Johann Bode. Compare this with Lacaille’s simple depiction.
© Ian Ridpath. All rights reserved
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